The man known to history as Heinrich Müller
was born on the 28th of April 1900 in the city of Munich in the region of Bavaria in
southern Germany. His parents were poor Catholics from Bavaria,
his father working as a rural police officer. Müller consequently attended a state-run
Volksschule where he received a fairly rudimentary primary education, before taking up an apprenticeship
with a mechanic, when he had barely entered his teenage years. Little else is known about his early life
and Müller remained a man whose personal affairs were largely inscrutable throughout
his life. Müller was entering his teenage years at
a tumultuous time in European history. The continent had been drifting towards outright
conflict between its great powers for many years. Two armed alliances consisting of Germany,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy on one side, and Britain, France and Russia on the
other had developed, fuelled by rivalry over naval supremacy between Britain and Germany,
for dominance of the Balkans between Austria-Hungary and Russia and over colonial possessions in
Africa between every power. And now in the summer of 1914, a regional
diplomatic crisis in the Balkans, following the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist, quickly ballooned into
a full-blown European showdown. Over the space of a few days in late July
and early August, the great powers declared war on one another, with the conflict soon
involving nations from beyond Europe including Japan and the United States. The resulting conflict, known as the First
World War, would last for over four years. The Central Powers were led by Germany and
the worst of the fighting would take place in the trenches of northern France on the
Western Front, eventually ending in defeat for Germany and its allies and victory for
Britain and France in particular. Despite his very young age of just fourteen
at the time that the war erupted in 1914, Müller saw active military duty before the
conflict came to an end in November 1918. His training as a mechanic had led to him
specialising in aircraft maintenance, a burgeoning field at a time when air flight, of even the
most rudimentary kind, was little more than a decade old. As a result of this expertise, he was drafted
into the Deutsche Luftstreitkräfte, the German Air Force, during the latter stages of the
war. He saw active duty on the Western Front, in
north-eastern France in 1918. His role in this, was as an attaché to the
artillery spotting unit, at a time when observation balloons, as well as basic reconnaissance
planes were still being used to determine where artillery units should aim their fire
across the trenches, a necessity for artillery units, which could fire several kilometres
but could not see what they were aiming at, across No Man’s Land. His service was well-regarded and by the time
the war ended, he was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery and also the Bavarian Military
Merit Cross for his service. Thus, he left the army in 1918 with honours
and was somewhat unusual amongst the future senior ranking members of the Nazi regime,
in not carrying a life-long bitterness about how the war had ended. Like many other former soldiers in Germany
in the late 1910s and 1920s Müller found himself drifting towards the Freikorps in
the aftermath of the war. The Weimar Republic, which had been established
to govern the country, following the collapse of the German Empire, had been commanded under
the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which brought the war to an end, to demilitarise
and decommission the vast majority of its troops. Thousands of soldiers now joined the Freikorps,
or ‘Free Corps’, a German paramilitary organisation of military volunteers, which
had existed in Prussia and then Germany, as far back as the eighteenth century. In the period immediately after the cessation
of the war, the new republic was beset by Communist unrest as the German Communist movement,
buoyed up by the success of their brethren in Russia since 1917, sought to seize power
in the very country, which Karl Marx had originally conceived of his Communist utopia for. The Freikorps were deployed in large numbers
countrywide in 1919 and 1920, to crush such Communist agitation. And Müller was active amongst them and saw
active duty with the Freikorps, in crushing the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic,
which established itself in power in Munich in April 1919. Müller’s involvement with the Freikorps
and his family background in policing, his father having been a police official in Bavaria,
led him into the same occupation in the early 1920s. He rose fast and was soon advanced to a senior
position within the political office of the Munich Police Department. And it was owing to his involvement in Munich’s
policing, that he would first come into contact with Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party, though somewhat ironically, given his later role
in the Nazi regime which would come to rule Germany, his initial encounters with them
was as an opponent. The Nazi Party had been established in 1920
out of the German Workers’ Party. It had emerged as a political party for right-wing
German nationalists, who favoured a type of workers’ revolution based on opposing Communism. Its membership was largely comprised of veterans
of the war, who were profoundly disillusioned at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles,
which had been negotiated by the Weimar Republic, viewing it as a stain on German honour. The party attracted support from veterans
in Munich in the early 1920s and under its leader, the Austrian, Adolf Hitler, it had
soon risen to have tens of thousands of active members and tacit supporters throughout Bavaria. Müller would have been fully aware of the
growth of this subversive group within Munich in the early 1920s, as a result of his police
duties, but this loose interaction became altogether more serious, in the early winter
of 1923. On the 8th of November that year, approximately
2,000 armed Nazis attempted a coup d’état in Munich, with the goal of seizing control
of Bavaria and then marching on Berlin to overthrow the Weimar Republic. But the Munich Putsch or Beer Hall Putsch,
as it became known, was a complete failure from a military perspective. On the morning of the 9th of November, it
was quickly broken up by German army detachments which had been deployed in Munich. And Müller was amongst the Munich police
officers, who were involved in investigating, who had been responsible in the weeks that
followed. Admittedly Hitler and several of the other
senior commanders needed no investigating and after a quick manhunt, he was captured
in the Bavarian countryside a few days later. Yet his trial provided him with an opportunity
to broadcast his views to the German public and he would only serve nine months of a five
year prison sentence which he received. Ultimately, the most striking thing about
the Munich Putsch is that the Weimar Republic failed to take advantage of the episode to
crush the Nazis, when they had the opportunity to do so. For Müller, his involvement in the police
investigations which followed the Munich revolt of 1923, ensured that in the 1930s, he was
mistrusted for years by many senior Nazis. Following this, his activities in the mid-to-late
1920s and into the early 1930s are again rather unremarkable. He continued his work as a police officer
in Munich, activity which was in itself somewhat significant in the long run, as Müller was
studying the methods being employed by Soviet Russian police organisations, notably the
OGPU, or Joint State Political Directorate, the senior secret police organisation within
the Soviet Union between 1923 and 1934 and the forerunner of the NKVD and the KGB. Through this work, Müller became attuned
to the latest surveillance methodologies available to secret police agencies in Europe and familiarised
himself with how totalitarian states could monitor huge numbers of people, in order to
maintain power and stifle political dissent. These were methods he would put to use himself
in later years, in his role as head of Germany’s own secret police, the Gestapo. For the meantime, in the 1920s and early 1930s,
he was using such methods, to better surveil Communist organisations in Bavaria. Müller appears to have developed a striking
antipathy to Communists or what were increasingly referred to as ‘Bolsheviks’ in Germany,
after the Russian Communist party. This antipathy would fuel much of his work
with the Nazis later. Though Müller spent much of the late 1920s
and early 1930s in relative obscurity, there were wide-ranging changes occurring in the
wider country. After nearly a decade of rapid economic growth
following the First World War, the global economy had overheated and crashed badly in
1929, the so-called Wall Street Crash. A Great Depression followed it and this hit
Germany especially badly. Millions of people lost their jobs and fell
into poverty. Life savings were wiped out and basic foodstuffs
and goods became difficult to afford. And in this environment, extremist political
parties gained ground, on the more moderate establishment parties. In particular the Nazi Party, which Müller
had encountered back in Bavaria in 1923, exploited German resentments about the post-war settlement,
in this new atmosphere of economic turmoil. They were soon gaining widespread support
throughout the country and by 1932, this was translating into nearly 40% of the vote in
the Reichstag elections held that year. This declined to under 35% in early 1933,
but a deal with the leaders of German industry, allowed Hitler to become Chancellor at that
time. And within weeks, the Nazis exploited their
new position, to begin outlawing all other parties and forming a one-party totalitarian
state. In this manner the Nazis seized power in Germany
in 1933. Müller’s political views did not entirely
align with the Nazis during these years. He was a member of the Bavarian Peoples’
Party or BVP, a conservative, pro-monarchy party which favoured Bavarian separatism,
but which was willing to work within the confines of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. The BVP was also a staunchly Catholic party
and this probably also appealed to Müller, whose political outlook at this stage, was
grounded in his roots as a Catholic Bavarian. Indeed, he was not alone in this perspective
and the party was consistently the most popular in Bavaria, during the Weimar era. Furthermore, it held regional power in Bavaria,
at the time when the Nazis gained control in Berlin, early in 1933. Germany, then as now, was a federalist state,
where power in regions such as Bavaria was devolved to a considerable extent, to local
administrations. As such, the BVP Minister President of Bavaria,
Heinrich Held, exercised considerable regional authority in Munich in 1933, but he was quickly
challenged by the Nazis in February and March. Müller committed his second transgression
against the Nazis at this time, by proposing to Held, that he militarily resist the Nazis’
efforts to overthrow the BVP. Held, though, declined to do so and resigned
from office. The power of the Minister President of Bavaria,
was subsequently stripped away and the regional autonomy of Bavaria was completely subordinated
to Berlin. Thus, by mid-1933, Müller found himself in
a precarious position. He had twice, once in 1923 and now again in
1933, found himself in a compromising position, in relation to the Nazi Party which had now
taken total control of Germany. He might have expected to be removed from
his senior position within the Munich police department and blacklisted as an opponent
of the regime, but he was to be saved by an unlikely patron. Despite his compromising role in the Munich
Putsch, Müller had caught the eye of Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst,
the Nazi Security Service, or SD for short, which had been established in 1931. In 1933, the SD and the SS, headed by Heinrich
Himmler, began taking over the police services of the former Weimar Republic and Nazifying
them. And they began in Munich where Heydrich became
aware of Müller’s skills in advanced surveillance techniques. After determining that he could be useful,
the head of the SD decided, to take Müller under his wing, rather than purging him from
the Munich police. Indeed, Müller was quickly promoted, becoming
a senior inspector by the end of 1933. Müller for his own part, was willing to adapt
to the new situation, as a man who has been characterised as extremely malleable in his
beliefs and one who wanted to progress in his career above all else. Müller’s career thereafter in the 1930s
and beyond, was intimately tied to both Heydrich and the Gestapo. The Gestapo or Geheime Staatspolizei, which
means the Secret State Police, was created in April 1933, by Hermann Goering. It was originally confined to Prussia, the
largest federal constituent state of Germany, which made up much of the north and north-east
of the country. However, its remit and areas of operation
quickly expanded. On the 20th of April 1934, Goering handed
over control of the Gestapo to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. And two days later, Himmler named Heydrich
as head of the secret police and its remit expanded to cover the entire country. Under Heydrich’s leadership, the Gestapo
became a specialised police service, often staffed by academically gifted investigators,
rather than rank and file police officers. Müller was quickly brought on board and by
1936, he had risen to become operations chief of the Gestapo, effectively making him Heydrich’s
second in command. And yet there was a paradoxical element to
this. Although he had joined the SS in 1934, Müller
did not join the Nazi Party, and indeed an official report on him from the mid-1930s
by a Nazi official, noted his dubious relationship with the party in the past. Despite these complications he continued to
be promoted in the years that followed. Müller’s work within the Gestapo covered
many areas of German life under the Nazis. Early on, the secret police was particularly
active in crushing political dissent against the Nazi regime. This focused on German Communism and the trade
unions, to a very considerable extent and it was Müller’s long-standing work in prosecuting
Communists in Bavaria in the 1920s and early 1930s, which made him especially useful within
the Gestapo, during these years. Throughout the mid-1930s, the Gestapo surveilled
and often arrested former trade union officials, the unions themselves having been largely
broken up in 1933. These efforts culminated during Müller’s
early years at the Gestapo, in the breaking up of the Markwitz Circle. This was a group of moderate socialists, that
had established ties to former members of the Nazi Party, who had been pushed out by
Hitler in the 1920s. Much of the Gestapo’s methods at this time,
focused on the policy of ‘protective detention’, whereby individuals of suspect political allegiances
were detained and sent to the concentration camps, which were springing up around the
country. Here they were held indefinitely, for protracted
periods of time, without having charges actually placed against them. Other groups which were monitored, within
what was known as Department A for Political Opponents within the Gestapo, included reactionaries,
liberals and intellectuals. Müller had a particular antipathy towards
the latter. Religious organisations were also closely
scrutinised by the Gestapo and Department B was tasked specifically, with monitoring
the same. Bishops and other senior members of the Roman
Catholic Church were monitored particularly closely by the Gestapo, not least because
they had political allegiances which lay outside of Germany itself, in the Vatican in Rome. Other groupings which Müller was charged
with monitoring, included those sections of the media which had managed to maintain some
independence from the increasingly dominant state-run media, headed by the Minister for
Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels. Finally, the Gestapo also oversaw the monitoring
of people’s personal lives and any activity which was considered offensive by the Nazis. For instance, in 1934, around the time that
Müller was drafted into the Gestapo by Heydrich, a special office was set up to identify and
monitor gay and lesbian people in Germany. In the years that followed, thousands of gay
men and some lesbian women were identified and arrested, often being sent to concentration
camps, where many died or were sentenced to hard labour. Müller’s personality was well suited to
work of this nature. Not only had he developed advanced skills
in surveillance and other secret police methodologies in Munich, during the 1920s and early 1930s,
but he was also naturally disposed to the tasks he was charged with in the 1930s. Müller was a workaholic, one who several
other senior Nazis remarked upon, as always being available to take their calls, day or
night, seven days a week. In part, this may have been driven by his
home life. In 1924, he had married Sophie Dischner, the
daughter of a newspaper man in Bavaria. And they had two children, a son Reinhard
who was born in January 1927 and a daughter Elizabeth, who was born almost ten years later
in September 1936. Elizabeth was born with a physical impairment,
the exact details of which are unclear. After she was born, Müller’s family life
became very strained and his contemporaries in the Gestapo and other security offices
uniformly noted that Müller’s marriage was unhappy and that he never appeared in
public with his wife and children. Moreover, several individuals attested after
the war that Müller was perpetually in the office, returning home only to sleep it seemed. In addition to being a workaholic who wished
to avoid his home life, Müller was immensely ambitious and driven to advance himself in
his career, an ambition which seems to have been his primary, perhaps even sole, drive
or motivation. Furthermore, his politics were otherwise completely
malleable and it is very hard to discern what he actually thought about any issue, other
than what he might gain from it and how he could amass further power and influence within
the Nazi regime through it. In actuality, his only really discernible
personal views during his time at the Gestapo did not involve any affinity for Nazism, but
rather his loathing for Communism, a trait which emerged during the formative period
of his life in the late 1910s and early 1920s, whilst working with the Freikorps and then
the police service in Bavaria. Above all he was a meticulous administrator,
the kind of imagination-less bureaucrat who could operate in a world of surveillance,
torture and persecution, if he felt it was lending a sense of balance and regulation
to a society. Contemporaries were struck by his ability
to spend hours or even days, passively questioning suspects until a crack in their defence might
show. Müller became involved in 1938 in a power
struggle within Germany, which had major implications for the direction of the country’s foreign
policy. The Nazis were determined to dismantle each
of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and rebuild the German military or Wehrmacht,
to the point where war could be initiated, to build a Greater Germany, one which would
cover much of Central Europe, as a first step towards conquering Eastern Europe in order
to obtain Lebensraum or ‘living space’ in years to come. However, despite Hitler and the Nazis controlling
the state apparatus, the Wehrmacht retained its independence to a considerable extent. Many of the generals, who considered themselves
the successors of the old Prussian military, rather than being Nazi commanders, held substantially
different political outlooks to Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goering and other senior Nazi leaders. And several of these were opposed to the rapid
remilitarisation of the country and the plans for an inevitable war with Britain, France
and Russia. Foremost amongst these obstinate commanders,
were the War Minister, General Werner von Blomberg, who was critical of Hitler’s plans
to initiate a European war no later than 1942 and the Commander in Chief of the German armed
forces, Thomas Werner von Fritsch. Müller became central to their removal. What has become known as the Blomberg-Fritsch
Affair, began in the opening days of 1938, when it was discovered that Erna Gruhn, a
woman whom von Blomberg had recently married, had posed for pornographic photos many years
earlier and had been suspected of being a prostitute. When this came to light, Hitler exploited
the scandal, to force the War Minister to resign. Plans were now initiated to dig up similarly
compromising information on von Fritsch. Müller was charged with undertaking this
work. In the days that followed, information was
collected which suggested that the Commander in Chief was homosexual. This was based on a report compiled within
the Gestapo offices, which actually concerned a cavalry commander, Achim von Frisch. The false allegations, combined with further
insinuations that von Fritsch had been involved in discussions about launching a military
revolt, were enough to force his resignation in February 1938, though he was later found
to have been falsely accused in all respects. Nevertheless, Müller and the Gestapo had
done an effective enough job, that Hitler could now establish greater control over the
Wehrmacht and with the appointment of the compliant Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel to
oversee the army, in the aftermath of the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair, Hitler was able to
establish greater control over the German military. The Blomberg-Fritsch Affair and the removal
of the more sceptical elements within the German army, occurred at a time when the Nazis
were accelerating on their march towards war. Ever since seizing power in 1933, the Nazis
had been becoming more and more aggressive in their foreign policy. No sooner had they established themselves,
than they began incrementally rebuilding the German army and the air-force known as the
Luftwaffe, in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Then in March 1936, another core part of the
peace was breached, when the Rhineland was remilitarised. Under the terms of Versailles, this region,
which bordered France and the Low Countries, was supposed to remain almost entirely empty
of any German military presence. Things escalated from there. In March 1938, Austria was annexed, while
just months later, the Nazis also sought to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia
in 1938 and were duly allowed to do so by the Allies, who believed they could still
appease Hitler and the Nazis at that stage. Then, in the early months of 1939, the rest
of Czechoslovakia and Hungary were formed into puppet regimes. Eventually, on the 3rd of September 1939,
in response to Hitler and the Nazis’ invasion of Poland two days earlier, Britain and France
finally declared war on Germany, signalling the commencement of the Second World War. Müller was central to the outbreak of the
war. In the summer of 1939, it was not clear that
the invasion of Poland would finally spark the war. Hitler and the senior party members believed,
that if intervention in the country could be justified in some fashion to the international
media then maybe Poland too could be occupied, without a wider war breaking out. This would provide an even longer window for
the regime, to continue building up its military forces. As such, it was decided to invent a justification
for invading Poland. Responsibility for this, was handed over to
Himmler, Heydrich and Müller, in what was called Operation Himmler. This would be a false flag operation, which
would seek to provide a justification for a German invasion of Poland, by staging several
alleged Polish attacks on German border stations and officials around the same. For one of these, Müller personally had several
prisoners removed from Dachau concentration camp, dressed in Polish uniforms and killed. And their bodies were then planted at a German
radio station at Gleiwitz, on the Polish border and a story was concocted, that these individuals
were Polish soldiers who had been killed during an attack on the station. This false flag operation was carried out
on the 31st of August. Germany invaded Poland the next day. Müller’s role in Operation Himmler was
a boon to his career advancement, at exactly the right time. With the outbreak of the war, a decision was
taken amongst the senior Nazi membership and the heads of the various security forces,
to consolidate the Gestapo and other police organisations under a new umbrella organisation,
named the Reich Security Main Office, the idea being that this would centralise the
security apparatuses, throughout the growing amount of German territory in Europe and create
greater efficiencies. As well as this, Heydrich was now promoted
from his post as head of the Gestapo to become head of the new Reich Security Main Office. Despite his suspect political past, Müller’s
role in creating the basis for war with Poland and Heydrich’s patronage, was enough to
ensure that he was appointed to succeed as head of the Gestapo. To ease his promotion, he also finally joined
the Nazi Party in 1939, a belated action which highlights the strange situation he was in,
whereby somebody who rose to such seniority within the regime, seemed to be a very tepid
supporter of the Nazi Party itself. In addition, Müller was promoted to the position
of Oberfuhrer or Senior Leader within the SS. As a result of these promotions, Müller became
one of the most senior figures within the German security apparatus. Only Himmler and Heydrich were more senior. As head of the Gestapo between autumn 1939
and the end of the war in 1945, Müller was responsible for discovering and suppressing
opposition to the regime. His particular skill in this regard, honed
since the 1920s, focused on identifying threats connected with the Soviet Union and Communism,
within Germany more generally. A notable episode in this regard, was the
identification of the Red Orchestra in 1941. This was a broad circle of Communist sympathisers
based in Berlin and elsewhere, which distributed leaflets and posters promoting socialist values
and civil disobedience within Germany. This involved figures from within the officer
class of the army and air-force, as well as members of the German judiciary, such as Harro
Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack. These people were not really connected in
any substantive fashion with the Soviet regime in Russia at all, but suspicions abounded
within the Gestapo, that they did and were planning something more sinister, following
the German invasion of Russia in 1941. Having discovered the extent of the group
in 1941, they were kept under surveillance by Müller for months, before mass arrests
were initiated, from the autumn of 1942 onwards. By the spring of 1943, well over a hundred
individuals had been arrested and the Orchestra was broken up. In the early 1940s, the range of areas where
Müller was operating expanded considerably beyond Germany, though police work within
the home country always remained his primary duty. Following the outbreak of war in September
1939, Poland had been conquered and occupied by Germany in a matter of a few weeks. Months of inaction followed throughout the
winter and early spring of 1940, so much so, that many began to talk of a ‘phoney war’
in Europe, but then in the late spring, a rash of conquests were undertaken. Denmark and Norway were quickly occupied by
German troops from April 1940 and then in May, the conquest of the Low Countries and
France was undertaken, in a whirlwind campaign which brought much of Western Europe under
German control, in the space of just six weeks. Early 1941, then saw Hitler aid his Italian
ally, Benito Mussolini, in Italy’s conquest of the Balkans, while the invasion of Russia
from June 1941 onwards, brought a huge expanse of land covering Ukraine, Belarus and much
of western Russia under German occupation. As these meteoric conquests occurred, Müller
found himself dealing with a range of matters outside of Germany, particularly those regions
of Central Europe in Czechoslovakia and western Poland, which were being most closely assimilated
into the German Reich. No sooner had the war broken out, than Müller
found himself increasingly involved in the regime’s policy towards the Jewish population
of the lands under German control. The Nazis were rabidly Anti-Semitic and domestic
persecution of Germany’s Jewish community had been underway since the party first came
to power in 1933. Throughout the pre-war years, this had largely
focused on politically disenfranchising German Jews, through measures such as the so-called
Nuremburg Laws of 1935. These prohibited marriage between Jews and
Germans and restricted the employment and economic opportunities of Germany’s Jewish
people. The laws also effectively robbed German Jews
of their citizenship. Much of the purpose of these economic and
political sanctions, was to coerce the country’s Jewish people into emigrating, either to the
Middle East, where Jewish people were trying to establish their own communities in the
Holy Land, or else to countries such as Britain and the US. And this intensified in the months leading
up to the outbreak of the war, most notably on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass,
when state organised attacks throughout Germany, led to the death or serious injury of hundreds
of German Jews and attacks on thousands of Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues. Müller was heavily involved in this episode
and was the individual within the Gestapo, who oversaw the arrest of upwards of 30,000
German Jews in association with Kristallnacht. Yet, as bad as this persecution had been in
the pre-war days, Germany’s Jewish community was relatively small. With the conquest of Eastern Europe in the
early years of the war, where a majority of Europe’s Jewish people lived during the
early and mid-twentieth century, millions more Jewish people ended up under Nazi rule. In tandem, the Nazi state’s persecution
became more and more intense from 1939 onwards. Already in January 1939, with the annexation
of Austria and other lands in Central Europe, the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration
had been established in Berlin, with a subsidiary office already having been set up in Vienna,
in the autumn of 1938. Its objective was to expand the policy of
forced migration of Jewish people, which had been in operation in Germany throughout the
1930s, to the newly acquired territories in Central Europe. Heydrich was appointed to oversee the Berlin
office and Adolf Eichmann was his counterpart in Vienna. The Central Office’s area of operation would
expand significantly in the years that followed, particularly into Poland. And Müller would play a key role in the functioning
of the Central Office, first as Heydrich’s deputy and then in his own right, as head
of the Gestapo. At first, the increasing persecution of Europe’s
Jews, centred on more intense efforts to force mass migration. Figures such as Himmler, Heydrich and Müller
were largely overseeing these efforts. As early as October 1939, Müller was supervising
initiatives to relocate tens of thousands of Polish Jews into ghettos in cities like
Warsaw. In this, he collaborated closely with Eichmann,
the individual within the Security Service or SD in Poland, charged with overseeing policy
towards the Jewish people in the conquered country. Again, forced emigration remained the preferred
tactic, to reduce the Jewish population of Eastern Europe at this time, but there were
millions of Jews in Eastern Europe and the war had severely disrupted migration routes. Consequently, Nazi policy began to coalesce
in 1940 around an outlandish scheme, championed by Eichmann, to transport Europe’s Jews
to the East African island of Madagascar where a kind of giant open-air prison would be created. However, this plan was abandoned in the course
of 1941, as it became clear that Germany would be unable to seize the Suez Canal from Britain
in North Africa, making such mass deportations of millions of European Jews impractical. It is unclear when he was informed, but it
is evident from surviving statements, that Müller was one of the first senior ranking
figures within the Nazi regime to learn during the course of 1941, that a new and horrific
approach to the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ had been decided upon by Hitler and others
such as Himmler and Goebbels. What has become known as ‘the Final Solution’,
and which led to the Holocaust, would involve the forcible deportation of Europe’s Jews
into concentration camps located throughout Eastern and Central Europe, though principally
in Poland, where they would be murdered by the Nazi regime, in massive numbers. Already in the late summer and autumn of 1941,
experiments had been carried out at concentration camps such as Auschwitz in western Poland,
with gases such as Zyklon-B which would be used to carry out the executions. And the bodies would then be burnt in crematoria
located within the camps. Müller had also been kept fully informed
of the Einsatzgruppen or death squads, which had been put into operation throughout Eastern
Europe in 1941 and which over the next four years, would be responsible for the murder
of upwards of 1.3 million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. He was also a leading figure in organising
and overseeing these activities in the months and years that followed. On the 20th of January 1942, Müller attended
a conference at Wannsee, a suburb outside Berlin. This was organised by Heydrich and Eichmann
and Müller also played a prominent role. During the course of this, many of the upper
echelons of the Nazi Party and the SS, who were in charge of the concentration camp system,
were informed about the ‘Final Solution’, which had been developed and resolved upon,
over the previous eight months. And from this point onwards, Müller played
a very senior role in orchestrating the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Much of his work, as it was devolved to him
by Himmler, focused on making sure that the evidence of the mass murder which was occurring,
was covered up, by burning the bodies of those who had been killed in the camps, a task which
became difficult in camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau where the crematoria
often could not burn the bodies quickly enough. Despite this problem, he was commanded in
1943, to travel to Italy to force the government of Benito Mussolini there, into increasing
the numbers of Italian Jews who were being deported to the camps to the north and north-east. Ultimately Müller was, with the likes of
Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann and Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, largely responsible
for overseeing the mass murder of Europe’s Jews between late 1941 and the end of the
war in the summer of 1945. While the ‘Final Solution’ was ultimately
decided upon by Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and others at the very top of the
Nazi regime, its actual implementation on a day to day basis was largely left to administrators
and bureaucrats like Müller, Höss and Eichmann. And the end result of the policy was catastrophic. During the three year period between the Wannsee
Conference in January 1942 and the period when most of the concentration camps were
liberated in the opening weeks and months of 1945, roughly six million of Europe’s
Jews were murdered, either in camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Treblinka
or by being executed by the Einsatzgruppen. Had he ever stood trial after the war, there
is little doubt that Müller would have been convicted, as one of the most egregious of
Germany’s war criminals and also would almost certainly have faced the death penalty for
his role in the Holocaust. In the summer of 1942, Müller was sent to
Czechoslovakia to oversee a ruthless investigation there. In late 1941, Heydrich had been appointed
as an interim governor of the region. He had soon established a reputation for cracking
down brutally, on any form of political dissent and he was quickly identified by Britain and
the Czechoslovakian Resistance movement, as a target for assassination. And as a consequence, some months later, on
the 27th of May 1942, in a mission codenamed Operation Anthropoid, Heydrich was attacked
on his way to his office near Prague, by two resistance fighters, Jozef Gabcik and Jan
Kubis. Heydrich was badly injured in the attack and
died a week later of his wounds, making him the only senior Nazi leader, who was successfully
assassinated during the Second World War. Müller was quickly dispatched to Prague to
investigate, Gabick and Kubis having escaped after wounding Heydrich. In an absolutely vicious crackdown in the
weeks that followed, Müller not only tracked down and killed the two assassins and the
resistance fighters who had sheltered them, but carried out reprisals across Czechoslovakia,
which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths, over 13,000 imprisonments and the effective
destruction of the entire villages of Lidice and Lezaky. Heydrich’s assassination also changed Müller’s
position within the security forces. In January 1943, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was appointed
as the new head of the Reich Security Main Office in succession to Heydrich. He was now Müller’s direct overseer, but
Müller evidently exercised greater independence under Kaltenbrunner, than he had during Heydrich’s
day. As a result of these developments, Müller
now became arguably, the second most senior individual in the implementation of the Final
Solution. As head of the SS, which had overall control
of the concentration camps throughout Europe, Himmler was at the top of the pyramid, of
those who were overseeing the Holocaust, but Müller’s role in providing intelligence
on the locations and movements of Europe’s Jews, made him arguably, junior only to Himmler
in this respect and senior to figures such as Eichmann, who oversaw the logistics of
transferring Europe’s Jews to the death camps and figures such as Rudolf Höss, the
commandant of Auschwitz, or Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor and then Treblinka. Consequently, Müller’s career as head of
the Gestapo in the 1940s is inseparable from his role in the Holocaust. Much of Müller’s work between 1943 and
1945, would focus on rooting out conspiracies against the Nazi state. Plans to overthrow Hitler and his accomplices,
from both within the military and elements of civil society, were proliferating during
these years, in large part, because the war effort had soured and with it, the chance
of Germany coming out victorious in the conflict. After the initial rapid conquest of Ukraine,
Belarus and much of western Russia in the late summer of autumn of 1941, the German
armies had stalled outside St Petersburg, Moscow and Stalingrad in the winter of 1941
and were decimated in the weeks that followed, without adequate protective clothing in the
brutal Russian winter. Efforts in 1942, centred on capturing Stalingrad,
but when that failed in the autumn and winter of that year, the tide turned inexorably on
the Eastern Front and the Russians began pushing the Germans back into Ukraine and Belarus
in 1943. Elsewhere, the Italians and Germans were expelled
from North Africa, early in 1943 and a southern front was opened in Italy that summer. Finally, a western front was opened by the
US, Britain and the western Allies in France in the summer of 1944. It was now only a matter of when, not if,
the Nazis would be defeated. As this reality dawned in Germany, many groups
began plotting ways to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis and try to negotiate an end to the
war with the Allies. Müller was soon dealing with many of these
conspiracies as well as unrest concerning his role as head of the Gestapo. One such episode involved the breaking up
of the Solf Circle. This was a group of German intellectuals and
academics, which had formed around Hanna Solf, the widow of Dr Wilhelm Solf, a prominent
German politician and diplomat during the Second German Reich and someone who had made
his opposition to the Nazis clear, in the years before his death in 1936. In the early 1940s, even as the war raged,
Hanna Solf held meetings for people who were opposed to Hitler and the Nazis, in her salon
in Berlin. Although they were not plotting any armed
revolt, the Circle members had actively tried to protect German Jews and tried to help them
escape out of Germany, when the Holocaust began. On the 10th of September 1943, a Gestapo agent
infiltrated a tea party held by the Circle, following which, most senior members thereof
were arrested. Several were sent to concentration camps,
while others suffered torture by Müller’s Gestapo and even execution. Then, throughout 1943 and early 1944, Müller
also had Gestapo agents arrest thousands of German students, who were involved in protest
groups, such as the White Rose student group and the Swing Youth. Again, although these were largely engaging
in non-violent protest, hundreds were tortured or even killed. As pressing as many of these security concerns
were for Müller, none threatened the Nazis’ grip on power quite so much, as one which
the head of the Gestapo was charged with investigating in the summer of 1944. What has become known as the ‘20 July Plot’
was a conspiracy organised by numerous senior figures within the German army, with the goal
of assassinating Hitler and several other senior ranking members of the regime and then
seizing power. It was hoped that a new military government
could then obtain favourable surrender terms from the Allies, as quickly as possible. The conspiracy, which was led by the German
officer, Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and others such as General Friedrich Olbricht,
became known as Operation Valkyrie. On the 20th of July 1944, Stauffenberg attended
a meeting at Hitler’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’ near Rastenburg in Eastern Prussia. When he entered he placed a briefcase filled
with explosives under the conference table. He subsequently left to take a pre-arranged
telephone call and it was during his absence, that the bomb exploded. However, while there was one fatality and
dozens of people were injured in the room, the explosion failed to kill Hitler, possibly
because the briefcase was moved after von Stauffenberg left the room. And as a result of this, the 20 July Plot
was doomed before it ever really started. After leaving the meeting in the ‘Wolf’s
Lair’, von Stauffenberg quickly headed back to Berlin. Plans for a wider seizure of power in Berlin
by the conspirators now kicked in, but with Hitler and the senior commanders having survived
and the plot being quickly uncovered, it all proved abortive. By the end of the day, the plans to seize
key buildings in Berlin by Olbricht and von Stauffenberg had failed. Both von Stauffenberg, Olbricht and several
other of the leading rebels were arrested and were executed at approximately 1am that
night. And Müller, as one of the senior Gestapo
officials, now came centre stage in investigating, just how deep the entire conspiracy ran. In the days and weeks that followed, anyone
with even the merest hint of an association with the plotters was arrested, over 5,000
people in the end. A very large proportion of these, appear to
have had little or no knowledge of the plot. Such was the severity with which Müller prosecuted
the investigation, that individuals who could not categorically prove their innocence were
nevertheless persecuted. Indeed, over 200 of the core plotters were
executed. While it was Judge Roland Freisler, the head
of the German People’s Court, who pronounced sentence on those who were implicated, it
was ultimately Müller who decided, who ended up in front of this kangaroo court in the
late summer and autumn of 1944. Müller was also becoming increasingly fanatical
in the final stages of the war. By the winter of 1944, it was plain for all
to see, that Germany was defeated. The Russians were barrelling through Poland
and would cross the River Oder into the heartland of Germany early in 1945. More strikingly, the Western Allies were rapidly
liberating Western Europe, following the D-Day landings in the summer of 1944. And Paris had been retaken in a short campaign
in mid-to-late August followed by a further drive eastwards which liberated Brussels and
most of Belgium in September. The way was now cleared for a drive into Germany
and the Rhineland in the winter of 1944. The only real hope now for Germany, was that
the western Allies would have a fatal falling out with Stalin and the Russians, before Berlin
was captured. Accordingly, the German military command was
playing for time and attempted a counter-offensive in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg
in December 1944. This proved initially quite successful, but
it was at best a delaying tactic, which could have resulted in more favourable peace terms. But Müller seems to have actually believed,
that the tide of the war was turning again. In the final days of 1944, he is recorded
as telling one of his officers in the Gestapo’s offices in Berlin, that the offensive in the
Ardennes would soon push the western Allies back into France and Nazi flags would be flying
over Paris again in 1945. This was pure fantasy. In the final months of the war Müller, who
had spent much of the war in Berlin, was joined in the capital, by a growing number of the
senior Nazi officials, who had been stationed elsewhere in conquered Europe for several
years. He occupied himself in trying to utilise his
network of double agents, to try to drive divisions between the Allied leaders. Rumours arose at this time, that the head
of the Gestapo had entered secret negotiations with the Soviet secret services, but this
is implausible. One of the few genuine political beliefs Müller
had, was his hatred of the Soviet regime and the rumours seem to have been entirely fabricated,
by a rival for power within the Reich Security Main Office, Walter Schellenberg. Yet the rumour would fuel later theories,
that Müller was taken into custody and protected by the Russians at the end of the war. Müller was one of the officials at Hitler’s
bunker in central Berlin in the final days of April. He is recorded as being seen there on the
30th of April, shortly before Hitler killed himself that day, and there is also a report
of him being in the vicinity the next day, when Goebbels, the Fuhrer’s successor, also
committed suicide. The following day the Battle of Berlin ended
when General Helmuth Weidling surrendered to the Russians. Following Germany’s surrender and the declaration
of the end of the war on the 8th of May 1945, the arduous process of identifying, arresting
and prosecuting the leading members of the Nazi regime and those who were guilty of having
committed war crimes was initiated, by the Allies. And given its central role in the Holocaust,
the maintenance of the totalitarian state and the torture and execution of thousands
of political prisoners over the years, members of the Gestapo were foremost amongst those
who were prosecuted by the Allies. The Gestapo itself had ceased to exist with
the end of the Nazi regime and had been branded by the Allies as a criminal organisation. When an International Military Tribunal was
established by the Allies in November 1945, it identified three key groups within Germany,
as those which needed to be held accountable for their conduct during the war and these
were the senior membership of the Nazi Party, the SS and the Gestapo. And individuals who were tried in the Nuremburg
Trials which followed and who had been members of the Gestapo included Goering, Kaltenbrunner
and the Austrian Nazi leader, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. But Müller would never be tried or convicted,
as in May 1945, as the war was entering its final days and hours, the head of the Gestapo
had simply vanished. Müller was last seen on the evening of the
1st of May 1945. It was that evening, that Hitler’s designated
successor, Joseph Goebbels, committed suicide, leaving the Nazi regime leaderless. Müller had been overheard to say at this
time, that he had no intention of being captured alive by the Russians. As the head of an agency which had persecuted
Russian sympathisers and Russian prisoners of war, Müller had more reason than most,
to be fearful of what would happen to him. Thus, he vanished right around the time of
Goebbels’ suicide, though there are unsubstantiated claims that he was with Himmler near the Danish
border on the 11th of May, shortly before the head of the SS’s capture just over a
week later. No trace of his whereabouts had been detected
by the Allies weeks later, but Müller had been listed by the Allies, as a person of
major interest and one who would stand trial at Nuremburg for his actions if captured. Accordingly, on the 27th of May 1945, the
Counter Intelligence War Room listed him amongst its priority targets who were still not apprehended. Despite concerted investigations in the weeks
and months that followed, Müller remained missing. His disappearance made him the most senior
figure in the Nazi regime, whose location could not be determined. Müller would never be located, but the abrupt
manner of his disappearance, has sparked numerous theories as to what happened to him ever since. One of the most popular, driven in large part
by Schellenberg’s earlier claims that Müller had been involved in negotiations with the
Soviets towards the end of the war, was that he was captured by the Russians shortly after
the fall of Berlin and taken into secret protective custody, in the aftermath of the war. This theory was further fuelled by unsubstantiated
claims, that Müller had been seen in Moscow and elsewhere in the years following the war. Another theory, which was given fresh interest
in the early 1960s following the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, was that Müller
had, like many other Nazis, fled to South America in the aftermath of the war. Nazi war criminals had been given protection
here, by the administration of Juan Peron, in the aftermath of the war. And as a result of this renewed speculation,
investigations were carried out throughout Latin America, in the 1960s to locate Müller,
resulting eventually in the identification of a suspect, a Francis Keith Willard, who
was living in Panama City and was briefly believed to be Müller. Fingerprint analysis eventually revealed,
that there was no basis to this theory and there is no evidence to this day, to suggest
that Müller ended up in Latin America after the war. Many investigations were subsequently undertaken
to both locate Müller and to determine exactly what had happened to him in 1945. For instance, Eichmann’s arrest and trial
in the early 1960s, triggered fresh investigations by both the Israeli government and that of
West Germany. Then in 1999, the US Central Intelligence
Agency threw open its records on Müller for fresh examination. These were largely contradictory. Some contained reports which seemed to suggest
that Müller had died shortly after the war, others contained reports from informants in
the 1950s and 1960s, which speculated that he had indeed defected to the Russians, while
others still, suggested that Müller might have been at large as late as the 1960s. An independent report produced by a committee
of historians and other figures at the time concluded that, while they could not say definitively
what had happened to Müller, it seemed likely, that the US government had not harboured him,
a theory which Russian counter-intelligence agencies had tried to promote during the Cold
War. The mystery of Müller’s disappearance was
further added to in 2013, when the head of the Memorial for Jewish Resistance in Berlin,
Johannes Tuchel, issued a statement which asserted that, Müller had died or been killed,
shortly after the German surrender in May 1945. His body, Tuchel claimed, had been buried
in a mass grave, with around 2,500 others at the Jewish cemetery in the Mitte district
of Berlin and had been discovered there by Allied investigators in August 1945. This claim was further substantiated through
newly discovered documents which indicated that the supposed location of Müller’s
body was in fact identified by Allied investigators at the time. Tuchel further claimed that Müller had been
recorded as still wearing his police uniform and his ID was found on his person. It has not proved possible to corroborate
Tuchel’s claims, as Jewish religious laws prohibit the exhumation of bodies, but if
true, this would seem to make it clear, that the head of the Gestapo, throughout the Second
World War, was killed or committed suicide, shortly after he was last seen in Hitler’s
bunker on the 1st of May 1945. The truth, though, is that with the passage
of over 75 years and numerous investigations, we will almost certainly never know for sure,
what happened to Müller, whether he died in 1945, was taken into custody by the Russians,
fled to South America, or ended up somewhere else. His fate remains one of the great unsolved
mysteries of the Second World War. Of all the leading figures within the Nazi
regime and the Third Reich, Heinrich Müller was surely one of the most reprehensible. He was seemingly possessed of no interests
or personality beyond the meticulous investigative and bureaucratic work which he undertook around
the clock, from the moment he joined the Gestapo in 1934, down to the end of the war eleven
years later. But politically, he was something of an enigma. Earlier in his career he had been involved
in investigating Hitler and the nascent Nazi Party in Bavaria, following the botched Munich
Putsch in November 1923. Moreover, he was affiliated with the Bavarian
Peoples’ Party in the late 1920s and early 1930s and even advised the regional government
in Munich to resist the Nazis when they were seizing power in 1933. In the end, he only survived and prospered
within the Gestapo, as a result of Heydrich’s personal patronage and he resisted joining
the Nazi Party himself until 1939, when it became a prerequisite to his succeeding Heydrich
as head of the Gestapo. Thus, we are left with a lukewarm Nazi, one
who seems more to have been politically malleable if it suited his career ambitions. Yet, whatever Müller’s own political leanings
were, they made little difference in mitigating the violence of his actions. Müller was one of the figures within Nazi
Germany who was most responsible for the persecution and bloodshed which was unleashed between
1939 and 1945. As head of the Gestapo, he systematically
rooted out any perceived opponents of the regime, be they left-leaning Communist sympathisers
or anti-war student protestors. A great many suffered arrest, torture, imprisonment
or even death, sometimes for relatively minor offences. And the brutal manner in which Müller oversaw
the repercussions in Czechoslovakia, following Heydrich’s murder in 1942, is symptomatic
of Müller’s methods. But it was ultimately his role in the Holocaust,
with which Müller will be lastingly associated. From as early as Kristallnacht in 1938, Müller
was playing a significant role in the persecution of Europe’s Jews and this expanded very
considerably in the years that followed. His centrality to the Holocaust which it led
to, is evinced both by his having been one of the first senior German officials to be
informed of the ‘Final Solution’ in 1941 and his key role in the Wannsee Conference
of January 1942. Ultimately, the mysterious circumstances of
his disappearance in 1945, are somewhat unfortunate, as they ensured that Müller was never to
stand trial for his crimes at Nuremburg. What do you think of Heinrich Müller? How significant a figure do you think he was
in orchestrating the Holocaust and what do you think happened to him following his disappearance
in 1945? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
